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Reader Scott Fairweather suggested that Toronto could lead by example while securing our path to a sustainable future.

“This would reduce reliance on non-renewable sources of energy and building operating costs, as well as set a good example for the city and beyond,” he wrote.

Turns out, the city has already started.

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In the past year and a half, solar panels have been installed on 10 municipal buildings, says Rob Maxwell, manager of the Toronto Renewable Energy Office.

“It’s nice to be ahead of the curve — for once,” he said.

Through a deal signed with Toronto Hydro, the city has installed 1,200 kilowatts of solar panels that feed electricity into the provincial grid — enough to power about 100 households.

More projects will add about 2,000 kilowatts by the end of the year, inching us toward city council’s goal of having renewable energy systems on all city-owned buildings by 2020.

Arenas and community centres have proven to be the best sites, said Maxwell, because to be economical, solar systems need large areas unencumbered by cellphone towers and air conditioning units — as well as shading from other structures or foliage.

This is what makes installing solar panels in urban settings “really tricky,” says Julie Leach, the community investment and marketing manager at Solar Share, which allows people to invest in urban solar projects.

“You have so many old rooftops and shading from taller buildings and trees,” she said. “We hardly do any projects in downtown areas at all.”

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Suburban settings are best, where there are lots of buildings of five storeys or less that have flat roofs and are in open areas, she said. You also need to worry about development.

“If you put in a project and five years later someone builds a condo tower next door, the investment is ruined,” she said.

Malls and warehouses are often good candidates, but municipal buildings such as garages where utility trucks or TTC buses are parked, above-ground car parks, and schools would also be good places to start looking downtown.

The city’s fledgling project has been swooping in every time a roof gets redone to determine if the building is appropriate for solar. This maximizes the time before re-roofing is needed, a process that is prohibitively expensive when there’s a solar project installed.

City manager Maxwell says the school boards have started installing small projects and the TTC has a project for Pape station, but the effort has been piecemeal so far.

“As the cost of conventional electricity rises and the cost of photovoltaic panels falls, it’s expected to become economical to build smaller installations that would just power the building itself in the near future,” he said.

New technology will also make it easier to incorporate solar power into new developments, using purpose-built components such as solar walls, shingles and windows.

These innovations would conceivably make towers — currently the worst candidates for solar — some of the best at soaking up the rays.

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